[yellowdog]

I have been using Fink/X11 for a while and now I want to see what the XDarwin/Ports look like. The docs mention that the installer will set up a new partition - /dev - for the installation site. Is that just a new directory or is it going to change my present single OSX partition? Will Panther change things around if I go to the work of setting XDarwin up now?
Any pearls of wisdom?

[drmbb2]

I'm confused by your post. XDarwin is just the implementation of XFree86 for Darwin/OSX. The only directories it will create during installation are /etc/X11 and /usr/X11R6 ("/dev" is the device directory). There are no "ports" of apps specific to XDarwin - X apps for OS X/Darwin should work fine for Apple's X11 or XDarwin (i.e. all of your current FINK installed X apps should work fine for either version of the X window system )

You can simply install XDarwin via fink (i.e. build from source) with "fink install xfree86-rootless", or you can go to sourceforge.net/projects/xonx and get the binary installs (double click on them, authenticate and continue as per any other OS X binary install).

There are specific instructions at the FINK web site about Apple's X11 versus XFree86/XDarwin (you'd be best to fully remove X11 before installing XDarwin, which would include purging your FINK installation of the placeholder "system-xfree86"). There are supposedly ways to actually run both on the same system, but I have not tried that.

As for panther, while I know Apple's X11 will be bundled with it, I believe it is an optional install. If you want it, you could just remove XDarwin - which can be very simple - just delete the app from "Applications", delete /etc/X11 and /usr/X11R6 - and then install Panther X11.

[yellowdog]

I think my confusion was that I didn't understand that I could use the same applications on both Fink and Xdarwin. If that is the case, then I assume there is no real reason for me to use anything other than my current Fink installation to make use of the Linux apps.

[drmbb2]

Originally posted by yellowdog:
I think my confusion was that I didn't understand that I could use the same applications on both Fink and Xdarwin. If that is the case, then I assume there is no real reason for me to use anything other than my current Fink installation to make use of the Linux apps.

Right. Keep in mind that FINK is a package management tool, nothing more. Apple's X11 and XDarwin are both just ports of the X window system (see www.x.org) for use on OS X - they just happen to be based on XFree86 (see www.xfree86.org ) which is an open source distribution of X. Any X compliant app should work for either, and FINK is just the convenient means to install those apps and their dependancies.

Apple's X11 has the nice feature that it is both hardware accelerated (if you use Apple's quartz-wm) and integrated into Aqua (eg. cut/copy/paste all works). But even now, XDarwin, as of release 4.3, also boasts hardware acceleration.

I personally use Apple's X11 with the quartz-wm on my DP 1.25, after using XDarwin for about a year on my old powermac. Via FINK, I have replaced Apple's XTerm with rxvt as I greatly perfer it as my terminal app. All my FINK apps work fine- the only trick in switching was purging FINK of the packages for xfree86 and replacing them with the placeholder system-xfree86, but changing your X installation is really pretty trivial.